Chapter V: Part 5

NORSE IN ENGLISH.—Professor C. H. Herford makes a meritorious attempt to recall attention to the influence and value of the Norse Myths upon English Poetry. William Morris was most powerfully and directly influenced by the Sagas, and of Morris Professor Herford says that “no other English poet has felt so keenly the power of Norse myth; none has done so much to restore its terrible beauty, its heroism, its earth-shaking humour, and its heights of tragic passion and pathos, to a place in our memories, and a home in our hearts.” It will not do, however, for (let me whisper it) who reads Morris’s poetry to-day? Has he a home in our hearts? Are his Norse enthusiasms really anything to us? I am not defending our generation for neglecting Morris, or for being indifferent to the Norse theogony, of which he was a prophet. Our age is one of prose, and the passion of prose is justice—reasonable and regulated justice. Terrible beauty, earth-shaking humour, tragic passion, and so on—the stuff of epic poetry—are relegated nowadays to the police court. Moreover, the Norse mythology is not only “pagan” in the sense of being non-Christian, it is pagan in the sense of being sub- as much as pre-Christian, differing in this respect from the Indian mythology of the _Mahabharata_, or the Egyptian mythology of the _Book of the Dead_. We can never return to it without committing an act of regression, since it is a paganism of a world inferior rather than superior to the “Christian” world. At the same time, since we must carry all our sheaves with us in order to enjoy the complete harvest of the human soul, it is necessary not to drop from consciousness the heroic past, albeit a past to which we may not return. Let it be enshrined and enjoyed in poetry and music now that it is no longer possible in life.

THE COMEDY OF IT.—Comedy still remains a secret hid from the English mind, and not all the efforts of Mr. John Francis Hope to bring it into popularity will succeed where the prior efforts of Meredith have failed. The reason, as Mr. Hope has often explained it, even more clearly than Meredith, is not only that the spirit of Comedy demands “a society of cultivated men and women, wherein ideas are current and perceptions quick”—a condition certainly not now existing—but the absence of three qualities, each of which, unfortunately, blooms luxuriantly among us—“sentimentalism, puritanism, and bacchanalianism.” Comedy, the play of the mind about real ideas, is quite incompatible with any one of these three vices. If you sentimentalise, play is over, and equally it is over if you are shocked, or if you carry the _suggested_ humour of the situation too far. But one of these things the ordinary English man or woman is almost bound to do; and thus it comes about that “play,” the sparkle of common sense, is so rare among us.

Meredith certainly worked very hard to instil Comedy into the English mind. His essay is a classic, and our only classic on the subject. And he may be said to have written the whole of his novels in order to illustrate his idea. Meredith’s novels are much more than a mirror held up in Nature; they are a model held up to human nature; and, from this point of view, they are only an appendix to the _Essay on Comedy_. The serious way in which Meredith’s novels are read, however, is an evidence of his failure, and it would be interesting to hear his secret comment on the critics who acclaim him as the grand portrait-painter of women. Did Meredith even set himself to draw a woman? Was his art not rather to “draw out” a woman from the imperfect society his times provided him? Were not his “portraits,” in fact, constructive criticisms of the women he knew? I put these opinions into interrogation out of mere courtesy, for there is really no doubt whatever about them. Meredith drew women still to be, as he hoped they would become.

“To love comedy you must know the real world, and know men and women well enough not to expect too much of them, though you may still hope for good.” That is an almost complete summary of the conditions of the comic spirit; but there must be added the “sense of society,” the social sense, which is quite as important. This also introduces a considerable difficulty for us, since if “our English school had not clearly imagined society” in 1877, when Meredith wrote, it is less than ever probable to-day. In 1877, such people of intelligence as were living in England were still more or less homogeneous in their general views about life. They were not eighteenth century—the century of our highest English social culture; but they were not yet what we have subsequently become, discrete and warring atoms of intellectuality. It was possible when Meredith was alive for a group of people to meet, and to create something remotely resembling a salon. The hope of realising a “salon spirit” was not entirely dead. To-day nothing is more improbable than even an attempt to restore a salon. Not only would nobody undertake to do it, but to nobody would it occur that its restoration is highly desirable. But the salon is, as it were, the foyer of the theatre of Comedy, as the theatre of Comedy is itself the foyer of the Civilised Life of Brilliant Common Sense; and if we cannot re-create a salon it is perfectly certain that the greater mysteries are beyond us. We may continue, however, to “hope for good,” since that also is an essential of Comedy.

THE EPIC SERBS.—_Kossovo: the Heroic Songs of the Serbs_, translated by Miss Helen Rootham, has now been published for some months. If there is any “epic sense” alive in this country, it must surely be gratified by the appearance of these Serbian ballads, which are much more truly epic fragments than ballads as we understand the term. In the ballad proper the prevailing note is tragedy—sometimes individual, sometimes family, sometimes clan; but in the Serbian, as in the Homeric, the tragedy expressed in the popular poetry is more spacious even than the nation; the nation becomes the race, and the race symbolises a psychological power, which may very well be called a god—a suffering god. Grimm said of these ballads that there had been “nothing since Homer to compare with them; they were the best of all times and nations.” Goethe compared them to the _Song of Songs_. Certainly there is something Homeric in them; and since they are sung to-day, they can be regarded as unique. Long dwelling on them, with a view to discovering their innermost secret, convinces me, however, that they differ from the Homeric mood in their comparative hopelessness. Mr. Baring says in his Introduction that these Serbian ballad-writers “saw the world with the eyes of a child and the heart of a man.” “Child” is a word of multiple _entente_; and the difference between the Homeric and the Serbian “childhood” is that the latter appears doubtful whether it can grow up. Homer, we know, occasionally let fall a sad regret that his splendid heroes should still be children; and in the plays of Æschylus the high philosophical meditations of Homer are considerably elaborated. But in these Serbian ballads there does not appear to me any sign of the _mind_ of a man, however much of the heart there may be. No Serbian Plato will ever find in them such a text as the Greek Plato found in Homer. It is not to be wondered at. Serbia has always been on the frontier of European civilisation, and perpetually in the trenches. Since 1389 Serbia has been in unbroken but unsubmissive captivity, and her deliverance from alien bondage is only an event of yesterday. But if the elements of the future are contained in the quintessence of these ballads, there is no sight of a new Athens in them.

ERNEST DOWSON.—Mr. Arthur Symons’s Introduction to the reprinted _Poems and Prose_ of the late Ernest Dowson has all the characteristics of the age to which both he and Dowson belonged. It is delicately appreciative, and not lacking in good judgment. Mr. Symons says, for instance, that Dowson was small enough to be overwhelmed by experiences that would have been nourishing food to a great man. But the style and manner of passing judgment almost completely contradict the matter of the judgment itself, and leave us in doubt whether Mr. Symons is not judging against his judgment. Literary criticism does not need to be literature; least of all does it need to be belles-lettres. Yet Mr. Arthur Symons and his whole school seem to aim at precisely this effect, that of writing in the same style as the work criticised. Thus we find him saying of Dowson: “all the fever and turmoil and the unattained dreams of a life which had so much of the swift, disastrous, and suicidal impetus of genius”—words and phrases which might have been written by Dowson himself. They are apologiastic of the person when what we ask of criticism is judgment of the quality of the style, and in the unfortunate identification of genius with disaster and suicide they are almost an incentive to the little artists to trade on their neuroses. I do not know whether Mr. Symons knew Dowson personally; it is of no importance; but his bedside manner with ailing geniuses would have been anything but tonic.

It is symptomatic of Dowson’s state of mind, though Mr. Symons misses the subtlety of it, that he was always repeating Poe’s line: “the viol, the violet, and the vine.” A special affection for labials and liquids is conclusive evidence of minority, not to say infantilism; and stylists with any ambition to excel, and to develop both themselves and their style, will be wise to watch their “v’s” and “m’s” and “l’s,” in fact, their labials and liquids generally. Dowson wallowed in liquids and labials to the end of his short life; his vocabulary never grew up, and I have no doubt that, had he been asked to quote his own best lines, he would have pointed, not to the notorious “Cynara,” which is sufficiently pretty-pretty, but to these lines, in which he came as near to Poe as originality permits:—

Violets and leaves of vine
For Love that lives a day.

“One is essentially of the autumn,” he wrote of himself. But that is not true, for Dowson was not ripe, but (I say it of course with respect) rotten. He remained in the cradle sucking sensations long after he should have been out in the world creating sensations. Life never got beyond his lips.

A SENTIMENTAL EXCURSION.—The writers of the _Venture_, a literary magazine published from Bristol, and written chiefly by members of the Postal Service, are sincere in that they are manifestly striving to acquire a good English style; and they are modest in that they do not pretend to have attained to it. Even better, and unlike so many current “stylists,” they do not say that the unreachable grapes are sour, while those only which they can pluck are the perfect fruit; in other words, they do not try to pass off their defects as new beauties of style. Their models are good, and their exercises are promising. The introductory note contains, however, a little cant, rather out of key with the prevailing mood of the journal. It demands “stalwart criticism,” not for itself only, but for literature in general. The _London Mercury_ appeared before the world in the same austere attitude, calling in prophetic tones for sterner criticism, more outspoken criticism, criticism that should both say and mean something, criticism, in short, of the kind which has for years ensured the ostracism of precisely that kind of critic. It is the easiest thing in the world to demand such criticism, and very popular on one condition—that it be never actually provided. For the fact is that the criticism in question is really killing; and how many of those who ask for stern criticism would welcome their own extinction?

Special attention is directed to the longish poem by Mr. Francis Andrews. It is entitled “Mother,” and the opening stanza is as follows:—

You can see from the gate which once enclosed my world
The tinted woods o’ the hill and the white road wending,
And among the nearer boughs whereon my stars were hung
The blown and shifting wraith of the blue smoke curled.

Let us stop at that and collect our impressions. It is a very dangerous subject that Mr. Andrews has chosen. The temptation to indulge in “sob-stuff” in reflecting on “Mother,” is well-nigh irresistible, since the sentiment goes back to the childhood not only of the individual, but of the race, and probably earlier. It is almost inextricably mingled with the tears of things. But tears are not a proper accompaniment of poetry or of beauty. The mission of Art is to dry all tears, and the utmost severity and serenity are needed in dealing with a profoundly emotional subject exactly to keep the tears from welling into it. That Mr. Andrews has not succeeded is evident from the opening stanza which I have just quoted. It is almost drenched with sentiment. Listen to the rhythm which is nearly a lullaby in reverie, and let us ask ourselves whether it is not calculated, quite apart from the words, to throw the reader backwards into his mother’s arms. “Which once enclosed my world,” “and the white road wending,” “whereon my stars were hung,” “the blown and shifting wraith of blue smoke curled”—these are sentimental rhythms, and their inevitable effect is to induce a reverie of the past rather than a meditation or contemplation of the future. The mood is backward-looking, and not forward-looking, an indulgence and not an effort of spirit. It is quite in accordance with the diagnosis that a concluding stanza of the poem should repeat the opening stanza, since there is no release in a mood of this kind. In great reveries it will be observed that the movement is forward and upwards. The action starts from a profound sentiment, but it works its way upward to a triumphant assertion of spiritual realisation. Look, for instance, at _Lycidas_ or _Adonais_, both sentimental in origin, but both exalted in conclusion. There the song springs from a dewy bed, drenched with tears, but it mounts and mounts until it ends in the sky. Mr. Andrews keeps well to the ground, and, as I have said, his concluding stanza is only a slight variation of the prelude. The influence of Kipling is to be discerned at work, especially Kipling’s “Envoi,” beginning, “There’s a whisper down the field.” Kipling is another of the writers whose sentiment is still tied to his mother’s apron-strings; and his “Envoi” and “Mother o’ Mine” are almost as poisonous to poetry as Meredith’s “Love in the Valley.” We need not be averse to sentiment as such, but the most careful discrimination between the nest and the sky is essential to an æsthetic use of it. Let us start in sentiment, by all means, but let us rise from it as quickly as possible.

THE NEWEST TESTAMENT.—Various attempts have been made from time to time to “render” the New Testament into colloquial English in order to bring it “up-to-date.” None of these, we may congratulate ourselves, has so far been more than a nine days’ sensation, and even less than that length of life is destined for the latest attempt, _Sayings and Stories_, a translation into “colloquial English” of the Sermon on the Mount and some Parables. The Yates Professor of New Testament Greek and Exegesis at Mansfield College gives us his assurance that however “startlingly unlike the familiar versions” these translations by Mr. Hoare may be, they are nevertheless “actual translations and not mere paraphrases,” and he commends the “style” to the “candid judgment of the reader.” The prose sections, in particular, he says, are “curiously reminiscent” of the “homely speech in which the sayings of Jesus Christ have been preserved.” It may be so, but then, again, it may not; since, after all, it is not a question of reproducing in colloquial English the colloquial Greek of the original, but a question rather of reproducing in English the meaning of the Gospel writers; and this may very well require, not colloquial English, but the English vernacular in its highest degree of purity, simplicity, and grandeur. I am not sufficiently acquainted with the popular Greek in which much of the New Testament was written to pass a candid judgment on its quality as a Greek style, but if the aim of the original writers was the grand style simple—as it must have been—whether they achieved it or not, it is indubitably achieved in the English of the authorised translation. Assuming the original, in fact, to be “faithfully” represented in the colloquial English of Mr. Hoare, I unhesitatingly say that the English of the authorised translation is nearer the spirit of the original than the present translation, and, in that sense, more fully faithful to the intentions of the original authors.

It would be tedious to cite more than one example, and I will take it in the very first sentence of Mr. Hoare’s translation. “What joy,” he says, “for those with the poor man’s feelings! Heaven’s Empire is for them,” the authorised translation of which is too familiar to need quotation. I do not see what is gained, setting aside the cost, by the substitution of the exclamatory “What joy ...” for the ecstatic affirmation, “Blessed are the poor.” Why again, “the poor man,” and, after that, the “poor man’s feelings”? Why also “Heaven’s Empire” instead of “the Kingdom of Heaven”; and why “is for them” instead of “theirs is”? The gain, even literally, is imperceptible, and in cost a world of meaning has been sacrificed. “Blessed” is an incomparably more spiritual word than “joy”—in English, at any rate, whatever their respective originals may indicate; and there is a plane of difference between an incontinent ejaculation such as “What joy,” which resembles “What fun,” and has in view rather a prospect than a fact—and the serene and confident utterance of an assured truth. Further, and again without regard to the literal original, “a poor man’s feelings” must be miles away, from the intention of the original authors, since it definitely conveys to us associations derived from social surroundings, social reform, and what not. Was _this_ the intention of the Sermon on the Mount, the very location of which symbolised a state of mind above that of the dwellers in the plain of common life? Was it a socialist or communist discourse? If not, the “poor man’s feelings,” in our English colloquial sense, is utterly out of place, and the original must have meant something symbolically different. The substitution, again, of “Heaven’s Empire” for the “Kingdom of Heaven” may be, as Professor Dodd assures us, a more correct literal translation of the original phrase; but only a literary barbarian can contemplate it without grieving over the lost worlds of meaning. What is the prospect of an “Empire,” even Heaven’s Empire, to us to-day? As certainly as the phrase “Kingdom of Heaven” has come to mean, in English, a state of beatitude, the reversion to an “Empire” marks the decline of that state to one of outward pomp and circumstance. The spiritual meaning which must have characterised the intention of the Sermon on the Mount is completely sacrificed in the substitution of Empire for Kingdom. The volume is published by the “Congregational Union of England and Wales,” and it serves to indicate the depths to which Nonconformist taste can sink. We only need now this “colloquial English” version in the “nu speling” to touch bottom.

NOTHING FOREIGN.—It is better for a nation to “import” art than to go without it altogether; and it is the _duty_ of its critics to stimulate home-production by importing as many as possible of the best foreign models. That home-production may fail to find itself encouraged to the point of creation is perfectly possible; inspiration may continue to be wanting; but of the two states of no home-production and no imports and no home-production and imports, the latter is to be preferred.

“Foreign” is a word that should be employed with increasing discrimination, and, most of all, by English writers. There is an English genius the perfect flower of which we have still to see; for perfect English has never yet been written. But nothing foreign ought to be alien to a race as universal in character and mentality as the English; and in the end, the perfection of the English genius is only possible in a spiritual synthesis of all the cultures of the world. Two tendencies equal and opposite are at work in this direction, and have always been in English history. On the one side, we find an ever-present tendency towards cosmopolitanism, an excess of which would certainly result in the complete loss of essential national characteristics. On the other side, and usually balancing the first, we find an ever-present tendency towards insularity and æsthetic chauvinism, the excess of which would undoubtedly result in a caricature of the English genius—the development of idiosyncrasies in place of style. Somewhere between these two tendencies the critic of English art must fix his seat, in order that his judgment may determine, as far as possible, the perfect resultant of the blend of opposites. It is a matter, too, of time as well as of forms of culture. Not only are not all times alike, but there is a time for import and a time for export and a time for “protection”; but, equally, there is room for discrimination in the kind of art that may wisely be imported or exported. In general, we should import only what we need and export only what other nations need, and thus, in the old mediæval sense, traffic in treasure. Thus guarded, nothing but good can come of the greatest possible international commerce of the arts.

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS.—Psycho-analysis is not the last word in psychological method; and a great deal more of experiment is needed. Freud’s theory of dreams, for instance, is excellent pioneer work in a field hitherto left more or less uncultivated, but it is very far from being exhaustively explanatory of the facts. Suppose it were possible to _control_ dreams—in other words, to dream of what you will—would not the theory of Freud that dreams are subconscious wish-fulfilments stand in need of amendment? But to control dreams is not an utter impossibility. Sufficient experimental work has been done in this direction to prove that the gate of dreams is open to the intelligent will. And there is warrant for the attempt in a good deal of mystical literature. I was reading only recently the poems of Vaughan the Silurist, and what should I come across but the following passage:

Being laid and dress’d for sleep, close not thy eyes
Up with the curtains; give thy soul the wing
In some good thoughts; so when the day shall rise
And thou unrak’st thy fire, those sparks will bring
New flames; besides, where these lodge, vain heats mourn
And die; that bush where God is shall not burn.

Vaughan’s lines are not great poetry, but they contain a useful psychological hint.

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND THE MYSTERIES.—It would be unwise to make a dogma of any of the present conclusions of psycho-analysis. As a means of examining the contents of the subconscious, psycho-analysis is an instrument of the highest value, but in the interpretation of what it finds there, and in the conclusions it draws as to their origin—how the apple got into the dumpling, in fact—psycho-analysis requires to be checked by all the knowledge we have at our command. Mr. Mead has raised the question of origins, but it is just as easy to raise the question of interpretation. I am not satisfied that the interpretation placed by Jung on myths is any more than correct as far as it goes, and I am disposed to think that it does not go far enough. His reduction, for example, of a whole group of myths to the “incest” motive, appears to me, even in the light of his definition of incest as the “backward urge into childhood,” to give us only a partial truth, an aspect of truth. For there is a sense in which an “urge into childhood” is not backward but forward, not a regression into an old, but a progression into a new childhood. “Unless ye become as little children, ye can in no wise enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” “Incest” is a strictly improper term to apply to such a transformation; the new birth might suit the case better. Mr. Mead takes the same view. The interpretations of psycho-analysis carry us back, he suggests, to the lesser mysteries; but they need to be “elevated” in the Thomist sense in order to carry us back to the greater. So long as it confines itself to the “body” psycho-analysis must plainly be confined to the lesser mysteries, for the lesser mysteries are all concerned with generation. The greater mysteries are concerned with regeneration, and, hence, with the “soul”; and even if we assume the “soul” to require a body, we are outside the region of ordinary generation if that body is not the physical body. The psycho-analytic interpretation suffers from this confinement of its text to the physical body, since “the genuine myth has first and foremost to do with the life of the soul.”

Another caution to remember is that reality cannot be grasped with one faculty or with several; it requires them all. Only the whole can grasp the whole. For this reason it is impossible to “think” reality; for though the object of thought may be reality, all reality is not to be thought. Similarly, it is impossible to “feel” or to “will” or to “sense” reality completely. Each of these modes of experiencing reality reports us only a mode of reality, and not the whole of it. Before we can say certainly that a thing is true—before, that is, we can affirm a reality—it must not only think true, but feel true, sense true, and do true. The pragmatic criterion that reports a thing to be true because it works may be contradicted by the intellectual criterion that reports a thing to be true because it “thinks” true; and when these both agree in their report, their common conclusion may fail to be confirmed by the criterion of feeling that reports a thing to be true when it “feels” true. It is from an appreciation of the many-sided nature of truth, and, consequently, from an appreciation of the many faculties required to grasp it, that the value set by the world on common sense is derived. For common sense is the community of the senses or faculties; in its outcome it is the agreement of their reports. A thing is said to be common sense when it satisfies the heart, the mind, the emotion, and the senses; when, in fact, it satisfies all our various criteria of reality. Otherwise a statement may be logical, it may be pleasing, it may be practical, it may be obvious; but only when it is all is it really common sense.

But can we, with only our present faculties, however developed and harmonised, ever arrive at reality? It may be that in the natural order of things, humanity implies by definition a certain state of ignorance, and that this state is only to be transcended by the overpassing of the “human” condition. Psycho-analysis is still only at the beginning of its discoveries, but on the very threshold we are met by the problem of the nascent or germinal faculties of the mind. Are there in the subconscious, “yearning to mix themselves with life,” faculties for which “humanity” has not yet developed end-organs? If this be so, as our fathers have told us, the next step in evolution is to develop them.

GENTLY WITH PSYCHO-ANALYSIS.—I am doubtful whether we have sufficiently developed the ideas of psycho-analysis to make a fruitful parallel possible between them and the ideas contained in Patanjali. Psycho-analysis, as the name indicates, is more concerned with analysis than with synthesis, and “Yoga,” whose dominant idea is re-union or synthesis, appears to be rather a complement than an analogue of psycho-analysis in the broad sense. Take, for example, the idea of Yoga as a means to the re-union of the individual with the world-soul: “Thou art That; Thou shalt become That.” According to Jung, this attempt at re-union may be nothing more than a megalomaniac regressive introversion, representing on a grand scale a return to the mother and infantilism. Since it is separation from the mother (actual and metaphorical), that, in Jung’s view, creates the basis of consciousness, any attempt to become re-united with the “mother” is an act of regression. It is obvious from this dissonance of doctrine that Yoga and psycho-analysis have not as yet discovered any profound common ground; in fact, in some respects they appear to be opposed.

I count myself among the increasing number of enthusiastic students of psycho-analysis. It is the hopeful science of the dawning era. No new era appears to me to be possible without it, and such a work as Dr. Ernest Jones’s _Psycho-Analysis_ is one of the books most worth buying at the present time. But it is elsewhere that I find the best justification for my enthusiasm, in these words from an old Hermetic text: “The beginning of perfection is gnosis of man; but gnosis of God is perfected perfection.” Psycho-analysis thus appears to be the beginning of the gnosis of man, and, in this sense, the beginning of perfection. But it is only the beginning. Mere morality, however psychological, is no substitute for religion; and the most profoundly and sincerely moral of men—Ibsen, for example—end in a state of despair unless at the point at which their morality gives out, religion of some kind comes to their aid. Psycho-analysis, I think it will be found, is doomed, while it remains analysis, to end in the same state of despair. It will teach us all there is to be known about the nature of man; but the gnosis of man is not satisfying. For it is only thereafter and when man is transcended as an object of gnosis that perfected perfection is possible. I would not, however, hasten by a single impatient step this second and completing phase of the process of our learning. The gnosis of man is necessary to the gnosis of God, and God can well look after Himself and bide our time. Furthermore, a premature attempt to know God before we are initiated into the mysteries of the gnosis of man must be heavily paid for. Religion without humanity is more dangerous than humanity without religion. Let us then settle down with concentrated attention to the problem before us, the material and method of which are to be found in psycho-analysis. We shall be able to afford to whistle when we are through that wood.

A CAMBRIDGE “COCOON.”—The new Cambridge magazine, _The Cocoon_, cannot be regarded as superfluous, the editors suggest, since its point of view is unique. It is not written by “theological” minds that “estimate affairs in relation to unchangeable dogmas and fixed beliefs,” but by minds that hold that things “are capable of more than one truthful interpretation.” The second of these contentions is true enough, but, unfortunately, the new interpretations of _The Cocoon_, however truthful, are trivial. Age, we are told, sees the Moon as just a “heavenly body”; whereas the youth who spin _The Cocoon_ see the Moon as “a wonderful cheese” or a prehistoric coin. Age, again, looks at the Great Pyramid and interprets it as a pyramidal structure; but our spinning youth interpret it as a “colossal and awe-inspiring cube,” with emphasis on the awe. The difference between the interpretations is, to my mind, all in favour of age. It may be true that the Moon is translatable in terms of cheese, and the Great Pyramid may really be a cube, but the interpretations are without interest or value. If _The Cocoon_ had said that the Moon might conceivably be the Devil, or the Great Pyramids the psychic meeting-place of the Rosicrucians, the new “interpretation” might have had some interest. As it is, we are back in the nursery, and not by any means in the nursery of the race. The earlier editorial affirmation is not even sense, but a contradiction of sense. “To estimate affairs in relation to unchangeable dogmas and fixed beliefs,” is not theological only, it is only means of estimating at all. Things _are_ so and so, and the unchangeability of dogma and fixity of belief are determined, or should be, by the corresponding unchangeability and fixity of things as they are. When we find that the nature of things changes arbitrarily from day to day, we may consider the advisability of changing our belief that it is fixed as rapidly as nature itself is transformed. Otherwise, if anything we say is to be “true,” it must be because there is a fixed and unchangeable nature to which our dogmas and beliefs refer. The alternative is not youth and imagination and “other truthful interpretations of things,” it is nursery chatter about cheese and pyramidal cubes.

Pass the articles on Balzac and D’Annunzio, both of which might have been written by Old Age or even by Middle Age, and let us see how the state of mind calling itself Youth deals with history. Remember that Cambridge, where the Cocoons come from, regards itself as “the nursery of the nation”; and then listen to Mr. L. J. Cheney, no doubt one of our future representatives on the World-League, preparing his programme. “It is stupid,” he says, “to write history or to study history, on the assumption that we Western Europeans are the salt of the earth.” And Mr. H. Y. Oulsham, on the same subject, remarks that “we must keep the sociological aim of history in sight”; ... “the be-all and end-all of history is sociology.” No wonder the _Manchester Guardian_—the guardian, that is to say, of Manchester—found _The Cocoon_ so promising, for the opinions expressed by Mr. Cheney and Mr. Oulsham are embryos of _Manchester Guardian_ “leaders,” they are _so_ cosmopolitan and _so_ humanitarian. Apart, however, from their extreme Age, bordering on decrepitude, I find in them not even an unimportant “truthful interpretation.” It is not true that sociology is the be-all and end-all of history as it ought to be written; and to deny, in the name of history, that Western Europe _is_ the salt of the earth (however it may have lost its savour) is just to deny and repudiate European world-responsibility. Things, again, _are_ so and so, and not otherwise, let Youth interpret them as it will. Europe _is_ the responsible mind of the world, and the be-all and end-all of history is the fulfilment of a world-purpose whose objective is more than merely human sociology. If the “nursery of the nation” has a different interpretation, the nursery of the nation is wrong.

_The Cocoon_ is under the impression that there is something valuable in Youth in years; that Youth in years is the only kind of Youth; that Youth in years is Youth indeed. Our first birth, however, is only a sleep and a forgetting, and real Youth comes only after the second-birth. The once-born are creatures of pure circumstance, owing their youth to the accident of time alone; but the twice-born are self-creations defying time; they never grow old, though they are always growing up. _The Cocoon_ fairly describes Youth as “a condition of energy and receptiveness”; but is Youth in years necessarily of that kind? As for receptiveness, we have already seen that the “historians” of the “nursery of the nation” either hark back or hark forward to ideas long since dead. And as for “energy,” barring its animal manifestation in sport, the highest culture demands the highest concentration of energy, and where shall we find it but in the twice-born? Whoever can make a turn upon himself and his habits of thought is young, whatever his years. On the other hand, whoever cannot be “bothered” to think afresh, but contents himself with what he used to think is old and lacking in energy, whatever his years or his blues.

It is the fate of the once-born to become pessimistic as they grow old, as it is privilege of the twice-born to increase in hope as they wax in youth. One of our Cocoonists, therefore, must be prematurely old in the former sense, since he lifts up his lamentation that “the beauty of English prose is already mainly a thing of the past.” It is not a sentiment for “the nursery of the nation,” and it is altogether untrue. Beautiful English prose has certainly been written, but the best is yet to be. Beautiful qualities of English prose we have certainly had revealed to us in abundance, and some of our greatest writers have succeeded in making an anthology in their style of two or three or even four of them; but an English prose with all its known qualities harmonised and synthesised in a single style is a thing of the future and not of the past. There are qualities in English still unrevealed. A great deal of “energy,” however, will be necessary to such a synthesis. Its creator must be not only twice-born, but, as the _Mahabharata_ says of Indian sages, “blazing with spiritual energy,” for the fire of imagination to fuse all the qualities of English prose into a style is too intense for ordinary mortals.

AN OXFORD MISCELLANY.—_A Queen’s College Miscellany_ is filially dedicated to Walter Pater and Ernest Dowson, both of whom, it seems, were Queen’s men in their day. Still another association with these writers is sought in the comparison of the college coterie from which each arose with the group responsible for the present miscellany. Something of the nature of a cult is indicated; and I take it that the various items of the miscellany are “corporate” as well as individual. The foreword says as much. In a vocabulary that seems most ominous for literature, we are referred to a “literary team” whose “output” is here presented, and to an attempt to “prove that team-work is possible in prose and poetry.” And the miscellany is the first “harvest” of “the refined product.” My opinion of “team-work” is certainly that it is possible both in prose and poetry. No individual has ever by himself written either great prose or great poetry, and the greatest literary works of the world, not excepting Shakespeare, are of anonymous—that is to say, of collective—authorship. The elevation of the group-consciousness, however, is everything, and I need not remark that a group whose highest aim is to emulate Pater and Dowson, and whose considered “foreword” contains such terminological ineptitudes as “team-work,” “output,” and the “harvest” of a “refined product,” is not yet upon a very high plane of discourse.

THE IMPOTENCE OF SATIRE.—A correspondent has made the admirable suggestion that a new _Don Quixote_ be written to slay the dragon of Capitalism with the pen of satire. The suggestion is unconditionally free; no acknowledgment of its source need be made; but anybody is at liberty to begin on the work at once. Some excellent arguments are adduced why the work should be undertaken. Capitalism has long troubled the land, and its evils are generally admitted. Reason has failed to make any impression on the beast, and sentiment appears almost to be its favourite food. Satire, therefore, is plainly indicated as the appropriate weapon, and at its crack, my correspondent suggests, the beast would dissolve into nothing amidst universal laughter. What more need be said but “Cervantes, forward!”?

Unfortunately my correspondent proceeds to weaken his appeal by affirming that Cervantes himself had Capitalism in his mind when writing certain chapters of the First Book of _Don Quixote_. In Chaps. 44 and 45 it appears to me, he says, that Don Quixote’s identity as a capitalist is undoubted. Sancho Panza’s identity with the mass of labour is equally undoubted; and the middle classes are represented by a number of ladies and gentlemen, a canon, a judge, and a doctor. These chapters standing by themselves would be a good allegorical explanation of the present financial position. But why of the “present” position, if satire is capable of dissolving Capitalism in laughter? Without questioning the allegorical character of the chapters referred to, which may, for all I dare say, be a perfect anticipation of the economics of Douglas—it is not encouraging to our present-day Cervantes to be told that their proposed method has already been tried by a master only to leave the dragon of Capitalism still to be tickled to death. Now one comes to think of it, not even Chivalry, an even more undoubted object than Capitalism of Cervantes’s satire, really died of the shock, for the very good reason that it was dead before Cervantes rained his laughter upon it. Even Cervantes’s satire killed nothing, and the task to be undertaken for my correspondent is therefore greater than Cervantes’. In the spirit of Squeers, I can only suggest that he who spells window, w-i-n-d-e-r, should clean it. My correspondent, forward!

The power of satire is usually much exaggerated; as a matter of fact, it is one of the least effective of psychological weapons. Almost anything can turn its edge. Juvenal is not reported to have done much more than incur the dislike of his contemporaries; and Swift, the most serious satirist since Juvenal, never effected anything by satire alone. His two most immediately effective pamphlets, the _Drapier’s Letters_, and the _Conduct of the Allies_, contained passages of satire, irony, and every other sort of appeal, but neither of them can be called satirical as a whole. Satire, like wit, is effective in small doses given at opportune moments; but, as in the case of wit, sustained satire defeats its own object. It owes what power it wields to the contrast in which it stands to the prevailing mood of the work in which it appears: its unexpected appearance therein. Surprise is the condition of its doing any work at all. Surely if this were not the case the satirical journals of, let us say, Germany or France, would have dissolved in laughter the vices aimed at long before now. But satire is expected of them, is discounted in advance, and positively adds to the attractiveness of the objects satirised. I will not go so far as to say that Cervantes recalled dead Chivalry to life by satirising it, though the crop of romances that followed _Don Quixote_ in England may almost be said to justify the charge; but it can safely be said that a satire directed against Capitalism would lengthen rather than contract the life of the dragon, by adding amusement to its claims to exist.

THE “DIAL” OF AMERICA.—The American _Dial_ is perhaps the most fully realised of all the promising literary magazines now current in the world. It is in all probability considerably in advance of the American reading public for whom it is intended, but it is all the better on that account. Culture is always called upon to sacrifice popularity, and, usually, even its existence, in the interests of civilisation; for civilisation is the child of culture, and has in general as little consideration for culture as a human child for its own education. The custodians of culture (or the disinterested pursuit of human perfection) are the adults of the race of which civilisation is the children’s school: and, fortunately or unfortunately, in these democratic days, their function is largely under the control of their pupils. Gone are the times when a Brahmanic caste can lay down and enforce a curriculum of education for its civilisation. Modern civilisations believe themselves to be, and possibly are, “old enough” to exercise their right of selecting their teachers. It cannot be said, as yet, that they exercise their choice with remarkable discretion, but the process of popular self-education, if slow, may at any rate be expected to be sure. In any event there is no use in kicking against the stars. If the forces of culture are to rule modern civilisations, they must do so constitutionally. The days of the dictatorship of the intelligentzia are past.

There are two kinds of judgment which it is essential for civilisation to acquire: judgment of men and judgment of things. Things are of primary importance, but so also are persons. One is not before or after the other. For instance, culture itself is a “thing” in the philosophic sense; it is a reality in the world of ideas; but of quite equal importance in our mixed world of ideas and individuals, are the actual persons and personalities claiming to embody and direct culture. Hence the transcendent importance of criticism next to creation in both spheres: criticism of personalities and criticism of “works.” The mistaking of a little man for a great man, or the reverse, may easily mean the delay of the work of culture for whole generations. And, equally, the confusion of the objects of culture with the objects of civilisation may spell the ruin of a nation. Few critics realise the magnitude and responsibility of their function, or the degree to which personal disinterestedness is indispensable to its fulfilment. Holding the office of inspectors of the munitions of culture, they are often guilty of “passing” contraband upon the public, and, still more often, of failing to ensure delivery of Culture’s most effective weapons. More seriousness is needed, very much more, in matters of criticism. We must be capable of killing if we are to be capable of giving life.

The _Dial_ is particularly to be praised for its courageous criticism of great dead Americans. America, like Europe, suffers from necrophily, a kind of worship of the dead. Indeed, as a good Injun was synonymous with a dead Injun, a great American writer is usually a dead American writer. All his faults die with him, and only his myth remains, with the result that people who would not have acknowledged the existence of, let us say, Whitman living, will not acknowledge a fault in Whitman dead. For a nation thus under a critical statute of Mortmain, the utterance of what seems like blasphemy is a necessary part of their education. They must know that the dead great, by very virtue of their greatness and the survival of their works, are still alive and active, and that the same kind of criticism must be kept playing on them as upon the living forces. The _Dial_ reviewers show no disposition to shirk this unpleasing duty. One by one, as the occasion suggests, the dead great are given the honour of living criticism, and treated as the immortal present which they are. Since their spirits go marching on, criticism must go marching along with them.

One of the recently so honoured dead in the pages of the _Dial_ has been Whitman; and in an essay on _Whitman’s Love Affairs_ Mr. Emery Holloway throws a fresh light on an old but still obscure subject. His “love affairs” were obviously more matter for criticism in Whitman than in some other writers, since Whitman was pre-eminently an autobiographical writer who sang himself. What, then, does Mr. Holloway find? A little surprisingly—at least to readers who have not already divined Whitman’s secret—that Whitman “suffered” from love, and struggled against it rather as a raw tyro than as the “master of himself” of his poetic fiction. In some private diaries of Whitman, quoted by Mr. Holloway, we are presented with the spectacle of Whitman grappling with his own soul after the manner of saints mortifying the flesh, or, as I would suggest, after the distinctively modern fashion. Instinct was at war with reason, even in Whitman, and, in the end, as usually occurs with modern men, it was reason that won. Mr. Holloway divides Whitman’s works between two periods: the first, in which he sang “untrammelled natural impulses”; and a second, in which he was concerned about democracy and the immortality of the soul; in short, with reason. And between these two periods, or worlds of discourse, Mr. Holloway tells us, was a purgatory, in which Whitman’s soul was tried as by fire. The diaries already mentioned contain some of the records of Whitman’s conflict with himself. Here, for example, is an entry bearing all the marks of a painful resolution. “I must,” he says, “pursue her no more” ... and resolve “to give up absolutely and for good, from this present hour, the feverish, fluctuating, useless, undignified pursuit of 164 ... avoid seeing her or any meeting whatever from this hour forth, for life.” The reader is to be pitied who does not understand, however dimly, what Whitman must have gone through in imagination and reality to confide to the author of _Leaves of Grass_ such a shocking confession. He emerged from the experience with that past behind him, but still, I think, unresolved. For it was not his to reconcile instinct with reason in an epigenesis; he passed from one phase to the next without carrying his sheaves with him. From being within sight of real greatness, he declined to the stature of a great American.

Following its faithful treatment of the Whitman myth, the _Dial_ examines the case of Mark Twain. It is undoubtedly a pathological case, and not only Mark Twain but America was the victim in it. A nation suffers the fate of its great men; as is their odyssey so is the odyssey of the nation to which they belong. Does a great man in any nation become corrupt; does he succumb to falsehood and to the morality of the herd? Even so his nation is on the downward path. On the other hand, does he maintain his integrity, even though his life should pay for it? There is a sign that his nation also will battle through. From this point of view, Mark Twain presents the spectacle both of a tragedy and a portent. Nobody can read his works without realising the essential truthfulness of the man, his marvellous capacity for intellectual honesty, his unerring perception of the norm of things. Mark Twain, permitted and encouraged to pass free judgment upon American and human life, might have been one of the cultural forces of the new world; he was one of God’s best gifts to America. We know, however, what America did for Mark Twain; it slowly but surely emasculated him in the supposed interests of the female (not the feminine) in the American soul. Under the influence of his wife who, as he said, not only “edited everything I wrote, but edited me,” under the similar influence of all that was bourgeois in America—Mark Twain consented to “make fun” of everything he held dear. Talents and powers which it is spiritual death to trade, Mark Twain prostituted for the amusement of a people whose deepest need was high seriousness. As Mr. Lovett says, Mark Twain “flattered a country without art, letters, beauty or standards to laugh at these things.” The judgment is severe, but it is just; and Mark Twain, I believe, would be the first to acquiesce in it.

That he preserved, in the back of his mind, his spiritual vision and knowledge, there can be no doubt. He sinned not only against the light, but in the light. One or two revealing phrases in his works have escaped the censorship of the female American he married. “In our country,” he said, “we have three unspeakably precious things: freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and the prudence never to practise either.” It must be admitted that this is a “snag” in the smooth current of a work of amusement; it betokened the existence of depths and danger. But it is nothing to the remarks let off in conversation on the rare occasions when the censor was absent. “I’ve a good mind,” he once said to a friend, “to blow the gaff on the whole damned human race.” It is tragedy, indeed, that he never did. We have the gaff blown on us all too seldom, and usually by men whose idiosyncrasies and abnormalities allow us to ignore them. Mark Twain was such a normal man that his blowing of the gaff could not possibly have been attributed to a neurotic complex derived from infantile suppression: it would have been the judgment of man upon Man. His failure to bestow this inestimable gift upon America and the world we owe to America, and if, as I have said, a nation suffers the fate of its great men, we may be sure that America will pay for it.